Kalyn Hoggard | Monday, 15 December 2025
Huddled in the corner of a plane bound for Chicago, the glare of my phone reflects off of my fishing glasses, as I reflect on practice.
Im doing thumbjitsu typing the best that I can on my phone. I know there are at least 6 of you readers out there and I try to never let you down.
I had a great team practice. I wasn’t maxing out numbers, but that wasn’t the point of this adventure. “Keep learning. Keep pushing. You’re so close.” I suppose in a very deep and personal way, you could say that’s my motto for life.
Broken, tired, and in debt with spare time, I’m still going to get up and drag my ass through two hours of practice as many days as I can, and I love it. I may enjoy this more than any other team or sport I’ve been on or played.
Don’t get me wrong my championship winning peewee football team and mates still ranks pretty high.
If you know you know.
I learned, I experimented , I explored new ideas, and I shared my opinion (shut up Marty I know what you’re thinking) I suppose that’s what life is all about. Certainly a good structure for practice.
The only bad part is that at some point Henry will be getting out his stopwatch. You can’t hide from the numbers, and you can’t hide from the harsh yet endearingly honest eyes of Mr. Henry. I’m sure he would love nothing more than to compliment your cast, but you will have to earn every word of it. Love that guy.
It’s more than humbling to get to stand in the grass or at the pond with the best casters of the world and perform, but I think it’s more important than just a practice of deflating your ego.
When everyone standing around is as good or better than you are at every casting game there is to play it seems the overall hubris of the group falls off rapidly. We all have ideas and feelings about why we do our thing our way, and It turns out that some of my feelings, metaphors, and theories really do help others get as much out of their cast as they can. I take pride in that. Maybe I shouldn’t.
I got to hang out with my hero this week. Mr. Elias is the youngest memeber of our merry group of casters, and that’s who I want to be when I grow up.
Elias seems happy, he works hard on these casting games, he loves to learn, and to be fair I’m going to need to keep working hard on that trout accuracy game or he is going to embarrass me. (I sort of hope he does.) Watch out world here he comes.
I finally became a casting club member. All though I don’t have any reason to believe this. I felt like I needed to be a member of a club with a pond. Although my data set is too small to jump to any conclusions, the Long Beach club and its members have been quite hospitable.